Mists of Pandaria: Guild Preview and News Round Up

Guilds have been getting new perks, rewards, and achievements on beta this past month. While there are no new guild levels, there are some new guild rewards like special shirts (Member's Shirt) that reflect your guild design.

General Information

Three Guild Challenge Mode Dungeons can be completed each week for guild experience beyond the daily cap. Each one rewards 10000 guild experience and .

Five Guild Scenario Challenges can be completed each week for guild experience beyond the daily cap. Each one rewards 10000 guild experience and .

Ghostcrawler

In our most recent tests and instance runs, Holy paladin longevity was much longer than other healers, even without . We need to get Holy to the same level as the other healers. It may be at that point that all healer mana income is too low or that damage in dungeons is too high and well have to adjust accordingly.

Ghostcrawler

This glyph isn't supposed to be a no-brainer for DPS. Hopefully none of the glyphs are. :)

At the risk of sounding more patronizing than I intend, a common mistake I see some players make is to look at maximum possible theoretical DPS and assume that is the DPS they can achieve. We have the numbers we think every class can achieve under ideal situations (meaning no movement or distractions, etc.). The best players in the world can deliver on these numbers while executing very complex boss fights. That's a little mind boggling for us, but it's true. Very few players are capable of such feats however.

2) Intermediate player who sometimes struggles with maintaining Inquisition, takes the glyph, and delivers 75% of max possible DPS.

3) Player who thinks he is more expert than he is, skips the Charred Glyph because that's what all the cool kids do, finds as a result that he struggles with Inquisition uptime, and delivers 60% of Mac possible DPS.

Don't take my percentage numbers too seriously, but you get the idea. Many classes have similar glyphs. My advice is to measure your DPS (in an actual encounter or PvP) and see whether you benefit or not. The rotations that works for the best players (of any class) may not work for everyone.

Ghostcrawler

We think the mana costs for Demonology feel pretty good and of course Destruction's mana works totally differently now. For Affliction, we agree that the mana costs are too high - possibly way too high. As some of the posters above pointed out, there is also a bug with some channeled spells, most notably , that charge an extra tick at the end. That isn't helping any.

We think Life Tap as a way of restoring mana works and has been a warlock staple for a long time. We just think Affliction locks on beta right now are spending too much of their time having to do it.

Ghostcrawler

If we add Insect Swarm back, it would not be just to have another dot to manage, but to give players some way to interact with solar or lunar power more. There are other ways to do that too, so it may not ultimately be Insect Swarm. The rotation is close to where we want it, but it needs just a little more to play with.

At the 5000 foot view, the point of the mechanic to begin with was to cast X spells for a time, then switch to Y spells with the Druid having some control over when or why that occurred. We don't think killing critters to get the bar moving or gaming it so that you stayed at one side of the bar forever really delivered on the vision for . However, those tactics did give players some control -- a way to game things so that more clever players could extract a bit more performance out of the mechanic.

We are concerned that we are too far to the other extreme now, where the game UI tells you whether to use your solar buttons or lunar buttons and you really aren't making any strategic decisions. We want to introduce some relatively simple, elegant mechanic to give you more control over how much lunar or solar power you have. Maybe that's Insect Swarm. Maybe it's something else. Try it out over the next few builds, keeping in mind that it may take a bit before we have something we are satisfied with.

Vendor Filters

Ghostcrawler

Some of the vendors have so many items that they literally would not fit in the current UI. There is a max page size that is something reasonable. Now we could expand the number of pages a vendor shows, but honestly that doesn't seem like the best answer just so you could scroll through 22 pages of BoP gear to reach the plate armor that you can actually use.

It is intended that BoE or BoA items are always visible regardless of class. It sounds like that just isn't implemented yet.

We also need to do some additional polish to make sure the vendor remembers what your current filter settings were, at least for the current vendor or play session or something that will feel intuitive.

Ghostcrawler

As promised, here are some responses to some of the more common DK questions we have seen. There are several threads on the topic, and I don't mean to suggest anything by posting here instead of somewhere else. It's also not possible to address every single (often contradictory) point brought up by every player, but hopefully this will give you some idea of where we are coming from.

Q: Every DK is going to take talent X.A: We haven't been convinced yet that that is the case. Please keep providing feedback on talents you like and don't like and we'll consider it.

Q: Blood's AE threat is too weak.A: Blood's AE threat should be comparable to other tanks and we'll make sure that that is the case. Remember that AE tank threat is intended to hold aggro against AE DPS threat. That is to say, if you have a DPS going to town on a single-target, your AE buttons are probably not sufficient to hold threat in those cases (otherwise there would be not distinction between a tank single-target and AE rotation). We don't want to buff Death and Decay for all DKs, but we could for Blood if needed.

Q: I don't want to stance dance.A: You shouldn't have to. Our intent with the Charred Glyph is largely to make it easier for a DPS DK to go Blood to "turtle up." We don't want Frost and Unholy DKs to shift a lot between Frost and Unholy Presence. If you feel like the right thing to do is swap frequently between the two, that's not intended and something we'd want to fix.

Q: What Presences should Frost and Unholy use then?A: Dual-wield Frost should use . 2H Frost and all Unholy DKs should use Death's Advance. Our thinking goes that a DK using a 2H will be flooded with more resources than they can spend unless they are in Unholy.

Q: Unholy DKs lack burst AE.A: There are numbers we worry about and there are numbers we don't. We want all specs to have comparable AE damage (and single target damage too). AE damage in particular is very sensitive to combat length. Different specs do better on short AE cycles than long AE cycles, and we're okay with that. If you aren't AE'ing for very long, then Frost DPS will probably beat Unholy. We're okay with that. We aren't trying to guarantee DPS to be identical in all situations, or else the classes and specs really start to blend together. Overall, Unholy's damage is designed around lots of abilities, including managing diseases, so none of those abilities are going to hit super hard on their own.

Q: Why doesn't the Gargoyle scale with mastery?A: Because it ultimately doesn't need to. We want mastery to affect portions of damage (or healing) and not just be a +10% damage stat that scales perfectly no matter what you do. If the Gargoyle does more damage for DKs with comparatively low mastery, we don't think that's a problem. Now if the Gargoyle damage isn't high enough across the board (especially in PvE -- it's still useful in PvP) then we can buff it.

Q: I don't like that Killing Machine devalues crit and that I can waste it on Frost Strike instead of Obliterate.A: We make abilities guarantee crit when they hit for really hard damage. The alternative is their damage is unpredictable, which can cause balance problems especially in PvP. We think there are plenty of tuning knobs to make sure crit (and haste and mastery) are all relatively valuable for Frost. As far as Obliterate goes, using Killing Machine the most efficient way is one of those mechanics we put in to elevate some players or rotations over others. The most interesting rotations (for any class) carry some risk of failure (and by “failure” I mean inefficiency not a total collapse of your DPS). There are times when you may want to Frost Strike on a Killing Machine. If you really want to Obliterate instead, you can hold the attack for a second or two. If you “fail” and “waste” a Killing Machine on the occasional Frost Strike, your DPS won't drop that much.

Q: needs to do Shadowfrost damage.A: We made a couple of talents do Shadowfrost damage because we want them to be of relatively equal value for both Frost and Unholy. That's not necessary of core abilities, because there is no risk of a given player not taking the ability. We're fine with Shadow doing more damage in execute-range, so long as Frost's damage is higher the rest of the time to make up for it.

Q: Army of the Dead feels weak.A: That's entirely possible. It's on a long cooldown so there's no reason it should feel wimpy. There is probably plenty of room to buff it.

Q: Runeforging is boring.A: We agree that this feature has not lived up to its potential. We still have plans to address it, though it's not on our "must fix" list for Mists. The current system works fine and we'd rather not monkey with it unless we have a system that we are certain will be an improvement. We don't want to cause a lot of confusion about which runeforges various DKs are supposed to use.

Q: I hate casting on Fury warriors.A: I'm not quite sure I understand the issues with this concern. is haste (not attack speed, but actual resource-generating haste). There should be plenty of classes who like haste. Even today we see a lot of guilds just use it on their highest DPS player, which often is not the Fury warrior. We'd like to keep the design as a buff you can put on someone else, just because that's what it was back in the Warcraft RTS days.

Q: Why is Plague Leech a dps increase compared to the other talents?A: It isn't intended to be. All of those talents are rune conservation talents. gives you free Blood Boil. Unholy Blight likewise saves you disease runes.

EDIT: I switched Frost and Shadow in execute above.I think you have this backwards, right now Unholy will do much higher execute damage because they have 25% strength and Master effects Soul because it's Shadow damage. This would be fine if Frost still had Merciless Combat but they lost that ability.

Yeah, you're right. I just typed too fast and switched them. Fixed.

Also isn't that useful when it's optimal for the class to stack Haste already, plus Fury gets the large Mastery bonus from it being an .

Hmm, that's not intended. means an awful lot of warriors for now. It's probably not necessary that needs to be dispelled in PvP anyway so we can just make it not an .

Comment by Ashelia

Comment by xaratherus

Me three. Couldn't they just like, increase the cooldown or something? :-/

Comment by Voltt

on 2012-05-21T18:02:13-05:00

I'm gonna miss "Have Group Will Travel"

I will miss it as it is a nice luxury, but I am excited to see more people out in the world, now, with the new flight path guild perk and the cross-server zones.

Comment by raikage

on 2012-05-21T18:02:40-05:00

Considering that Void Storage and Transmog stand to be the longstanding gold sinks, I still think connecting them to a guild perk (even how minor this discount is) is a bit of wasteful of a guild perk in my opinion especially at that high of a tier for MoP.

Comment by aburkey

on 2012-05-21T18:07:52-05:00

Not having "have group will travel" is gonna suck big time for guilds trying to get around for "older" raids or dungeons whenever they are in the mood to relive some of WoW's past glory....

Comment by Kanariya

on 2012-05-21T18:22:03-05:00

In my opinion, Have Group, Will Travel is an unnecessary luxury that added yet another layer of irresponsibility to the raiding player-base. It has some nice situational uses in the world, but its primary use is to summon lazy raiders to the raid, and its these people complaining about its removal the most. If you can't log on early enough to spend the two minutes it takes to get to the entrance, why are you even raiding at all?

Comment by Voltt

on 2012-05-21T18:25:16-05:00

In my opinion, Have Group, Will Travel is an unnecessary luxury that added yet another layer of irresponsibility to the raiding player-base. It has some nice situational uses in the world, but its primary use is to summon lazy raiders to the raid, and its these people complaining about its removal the most. If you can't log on early enough to spend the two minutes it takes to get to the entrance, why are you even raiding at all?

I agree. Also, for what aburkey said, it's not going to suck that much, they can just fly there. If people are too lazy to take a flight path, get up and get a drink or stretch or whatever during it, then they shouldn't be doing those old raids anyway.

Comment by edarien

on 2012-05-21T18:27:46-05:00

Not having "have group will travel" is gonna suck big time for guilds trying to get around for "older" raids or dungeons whenever they are in the mood to relive some of WoW's ast glory....

Exactly this. Have Group Will Travel is a perfect talent for guilds. It encourages higher levels to help lower levels, it encourages older content to be re-explored or even explored for the first time by level cap players who never had a chance to run certain instances, quests, etc while they were leveling. This is a real shame to lose. I like the new perks, but this isn't one that we should be giving up as it's the only one that encourages a group-friendly atmosphere in guild. The rest are all selfish talents that everyone just joins a level 25 Guild to have them and not talk to anyone else. HGWT is a genuine loss to guild community and teamwork in general.

Also, I edited your post to what I thought it should read as, although perhaps I'm wrong. In which case, sorry for doing so.

Comment by Nulgar

on 2012-05-21T18:30:34-05:00

Not having "have group will travel" is gonna suck big time for guilds trying to get around for "older" raids or dungeons whenever they are in the mood to relive some of WoW's fast glory....

yup, it's not gonna repopulate the world, people will still idle in Org/SW and the respective Pandaria hubs, and take taxis to raids etc. - taxis will be used often with that new guild perk, while older zones will only be populated by levelling players.

Instead of sending one player, they'll just send 2+ people to summon via the stones.

Comment by Adamsm

on 2012-05-21T18:46:12-05:00

Warlocks are going to be useful again, in regards to their very ignored skill that disappeared all during Cata.

Comment by TMcMahon51

on 2012-05-21T18:47:10-05:00

I will miss it as it is a nice luxury, but I am excited to see more people out in the world

I have the sinking feeling the exact opposite will end up happening.

Comment by Ederhammer

on 2012-05-21T20:09:51-05:00

In my opinion, Have Group, Will Travel is an unnecessary luxury that added yet another layer of irresponsibility to the raiding player-base. It has some nice situational uses in the world, but its primary use is to summon lazy raiders to the raid, and its these people complaining about its removal the most. If you can't log on early enough to spend the two minutes it takes to get to the entrance, why are you even raiding at all?

I disagree i have x-realm friends and i makes it really easy for us to raid without having any problems sorry you feel that way but you're slim few who think this way

Comment by Darkerdesign

on 2012-05-21T20:34:48-05:00

Everytime i see him post "we want to" I immediately substitute everything that comes after it with "screw something up even worse."

So far it looks like my DK is still going to be a farmer. My Druid is going to stay cat, and my Warlock is going to stay unplayed.

Comment by Maelynn

on 2012-05-22T03:57:31-05:00

I'm going to miss HGWT dearly, but not out of laziness. Right now I use it on my levelling alt to persuade the jaded max-level guildies to come boost me through a BC heroic. I use it on my main who's after a mogging set to persuade people to come run BT with me. Without this perk, I'll have no leverage. :(

Another thing I used the perk for is to have my lvl 1 twink summoned to places she otherwise couldn't access. However, with the merging of achievements/pets/mounts accountwide that's probably not going to matter anymore anyway - my twink will be the subject of an involuntarily retirement, sadly enough. Ah well, she's still my fancy banker. ^^

The Warlock's closet is nice enough for summoning (my main is a Warlock, so I now all about its usefulness), but the fact that it requires 2 other people to set up makes it only really useful when raiding. This is also why I don't buy the whole "stop the lazy raiders from being more lazy" argument - it's not as if raids never take any Warlocks along, and everybody had to fly the whole way themselves before the perk was introduced. Make people see more of the continent? Oh please, who are you kidding?

Comment by tobindax

on 2012-05-22T04:08:45-05:00

Isn't the level 30 perk a bit uninteresting?

Comment by Harrowing

on 2012-05-22T06:00:16-05:00

Can someone please slap some sense into Blizzard!

Have Group Will Travel is one of the most essential things a person needs in game. And I play as a Lock. I haven't always got 3 people with me to Summon a Summoning Stone.

Level 30 Perk is pointless. To my knowledge barely anyone uses Riping-U-Off Storage (Apparently the Goblins run the show behind the scenes!) and 10% off Transmog is nothing, it only costs me 40G on average.

In fact, before we all would say, Blizzard Nerfed X.Y.Z.

Now we can just say Blizzard Have Nerfed WoW

Comment by ksabaras

on 2012-05-22T07:25:19-05:00

Questions about BOA pants - does this means that we'll be able to buy those even if not in guild?Since it says that they are available for free now

Comment by Linkno1

on 2012-05-22T07:44:32-05:00

Can someone please slap some sense into Blizzard!

Have Group Will Travel is one of the most essential things a person needs in game. And I play as a Lock. I haven't always got 3 people with me to Summon a Summoning Stone.

It isn't essential, it was just a tool for lazy people. It has only been here since Cata, how do you think groups used to get to places? It takes 5 minutes maximum to get wherever you are wanting the group to be, if you can't be bothered to do that then...well...

I personally look forward to more people being out and about while I am adventuring, this helps with that and judging by the comments most people agree.

Honestly, I hope they remove 'Mass Ress' aswell, that is another tool that has made things slightly lazier and caused more problems. "OMG rouge! Why didn't you vanish so you could mass ress us?" *you have been removed from the group*Now anybody with stealth is also a healer ¬¬

I do for one but then again, I am not one of the people that sits idol in Org doing nothing whilst waiting for a que. I actually go and do things around the world whilst I wait for ques, hell, I go and do things around the world just because. This will help a great deal in getting around for me as one of my complaints was that flight paths felt slow.

Level 30 Perk is pointless. To my knowledge barely anyone uses Riping-U-Off Storage (Apparently the Goblins run the show behind the scenes!) and 10% off Transmog is nothing, it only costs me 40G on average.

Perks are not supposed to be essential. THIS is to me what a perk should be, a non essential boost to something.

In fact, before we all would say, Blizzard Nerfed X.Y.Z.

Now we can just say Blizzard Have Nerfed WoW

I hope so. Cata was a massive faceroll. Things need nerfing. Everything was just catered to lazy people. No, not casuals, just lazy people. Oh, and people who didn't like wiping.

Comment by TheReal

on 2012-05-22T07:52:49-05:00

Warlocks are going to be useful again, in regards to their very ignored skill that disappeared all during Cata.

I've noticed this. Standing in front of Alizabal and people are complaining about summons, and then someone runs to the front of the instance to use HGWT. Like, seriously? There are 2 locks standing RIGHT HERE...